


The Mockingbird House

by cryptonomicon



Series: Gifts & Miscellaneous Drabbles [3]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Cryptography, Espionage, M/M, World War II, foreshadowing of Cold War tensions, international cooperation, mentions of bribery, mentions of extortion, mentions of internment camp conditions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-14
Updated: 2013-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-29 07:43:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/684505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptonomicon/pseuds/cryptonomicon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Clint landed his assignment to investigate The Mockingbird file, he was entirely unsure what to expect. Vague rumors had flown in and out of the DC offices for months before it had even been legally acquired, insinuating all manner of intrigue and trouble. </p><p>What he discovered, in the end, was not something he had ever intended to learn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mockingbird House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [koppywriting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/koppywriting/gifts).



When Clint got the file, it was tattered and worn. Stamps littered it, but across the top in stamped letters was the word _Mockingbird_. The Mockingbird file, which Clint had heard rumors about for the months it had been floating around the offices since its acquisition, was not something he had been expecting to handle.

Big projects were not usually foisted onto rookies, but he supposed with all of the goings on, all of the bigger wigs had better things to be doing.

He was disappointed that it involved a move from their Brooklyn office. He had enjoyed the antique shop, and the fact that it kept them well away from the rest of the offices in DC that were positively swarming with the war’s ungodly mire. Of all the places to be moved to, there was nothing he had in particular against New England.

Cape Cod just seemed a bit banal by comparison, though he had known it inhabited. In these times, he could not imagine how empty it would be. Perhaps that was why they chose it: it was relatively close-range but retained a level of common privacy that was as good as one could do while hiding in plain sight.

He didn’t read the Mockingbird file until he had procured and moved into his apartment in Boston. Boston was not his city: it smelled like fish and startlingly limey-esque primness.

The apartment, however, was not his and was not paid for by him, and therefore he refrained from openly complaining too much. Getting free digs and transportation on top of actual pay was not something anyone in that day and age could shake a stick at. Though Clint had never been accused of being wise, he had also never been directly accused of being a totally thoughtless bastard.

Well, that Romanov woman may have done it once or twice, but that’s what she called _everyone_.

Most of what he hated about Boston was that he couldn’t go around without being very critically observed. The women of America had taken the dire needs of war in stride, just as their men had done. But when they saw a strapping young man with all appearances idly walking the streets, their eyes narrowed with dangerous judgment. In DC or New York it was at least more common: people there knew that there was other work to be done than slay the Fritz and their buddy Hitler. They might not have known necessarily what the work entailed, but they at least could fathom its existence.

The people of Boston had no such sympathy for him, and so he often had his groceries ordered ahead of time so that they would be delivered to his door. He didn’t want to risk pissing off the women of the markets who could provide him with faulty food stock. He valued his life more than that.

So it was within the sanctity of his own abode and safely secured groceries that he began reading the Mockingbird file over a cup of tea, the third one he’d steeped with this tea-spoon of leaves. He would steep those leaves two more times for that one reading before he gave up the ghost, both on his reading and on the remaining potency of his tea leaves.

The Mockingbird House was in a little ‘urb called East Falmouth, down almost on the verge of the state and about an hour’s bus ride from Boston. It was also very conveniently close to Otis, which was a fair comfort in the case of a true emergency. Clint doubted that anymore Fritz would have the balls to launch a direct attack on the Yankees, with how well that had gone over for the Japs. Having Otis near still felt better than being without it.

Much of the account contained in the Mockingbird file was mixed and unintelligible. It was a small but prestigious file for all that was in it, if only because of all of the sweat the Yanks had put into getting it on the right side of the Atlantic.

That was where Clint came in. He had been an excellent interrogator when their internal discrepancies had reared their ugly heads. _Internal Conduct Enforcement_ was the clever little name they’d come up with for his division, which was nothing more than a weeding service that did its task with poisons and pistols rather than shears and spades. _ICE_ was effective. It got what it wanted.

Now, it seemed, they wanted answers to this mystery surrounding the Mockingbird file.

Clint didn’t blame them, but decided not to get too mired in his own predictions. He had often found that his anticipations were nowhere near as oriented and realistic as the answers were. The cost had been dire a few times, and in this particular case that was the last option available to them.

It was April 1st, 1943 when he first visited the Mockingbird House. He did so purposefully, knowing that the subject of all this interest was only a man.

And all men had birthdays.

He had not been able to muster up all of the ingredients for a full cake, but he had managed to bake, and not to burn, a whole batch of cookies just for the event. If that didn’t impress the damn guy, he wasn’t sure what would.

An officer from Otis picked him up from the bus station and drove him to the house. Clint had been debriefed with the names of the personnel at Otis that were cleared for communications on this task, and all of them he had so far contacted had been more than happy to facilitate him. Hell, when the officer saw him with cookies, the man even offered to find him a balloon to take with him.

A tempting thought though it was, he had declined.

The driveway was empty at the Mockingbird House, but the lawn and garden were lush and well-tended. That stateliness was none of the tenant’s work: he was not permitted unless heavily escorted to leave the house at all. The property’s monitored surroundings and heavily reinforced windows and doors insured general safety, but with tensions still high and _ICE_ not finished with its purging work yet, lounging out on the lawn was not yet a safe or viable option for their guest.

The officer, a Lieutenant Hill, had driven off before the resident had answered the door. Clint wasn’t even sure he had opened the door until he saw the shadow of a man standing just behind it. It looked like the wind could just as easily have blown open the door as it could have blown over the man.

It wasn’t until that moment that he understood all the horror stories that had been drifted over encrypted lines about _camps_ strewn across Germany and Poland. The moment he stepped in, and saw the man in his own light, he understood what it was to have starvation of the _being_.

In only mildly accented English the specter of a man offered him to sit in the drawing room. Clint was so dumbstruck by being able to in gruesome detail see every bone in the man’s wrist that he did not know how to respond but to nod dumbly.

The man moved like a ghost across the room, and folded into a chair like a feather that had spent an eternity fluttering to the floor. Clint followed, sitting with his cookies in hand and not a cogent thought on his mind.

When finally he snapped out of his stupor, he made to hand the wax-paper wrapped cookies across the coffee table to where his subject sat facing him. “I made you cookies,” he said simply. The man took them, looking at the package with no discernible response on his face for a long while. Clint attempted to explain in order to garner some manner of response.

“They told me you birthday is April 1st,” he murmured, afraid of talking too loudly. “That’s today.”

When the Norwegian looked up at him, Clint got his first taste of just how green his eyes were. They looked at him with detached surprise.

“Is it?” The man’s voice was as coarse and disheveled as the brutally sheared hair still left on his head. He plucked at the edges of his paper package, but did not unfold it. He did not say any more.

Clint nodded, leaning back on the dully floral couch. It was the type of comfortable heinous thing that New England grandmothers bought for their husbands to rest their backs on. He decided that from then on, it was his couch.

“I’m sure you think that I come representing the American military.” The man across from him made no response. “I’m sure that it seems we know everything about you.” That earned him just a faint twitch of the other man’s fingers, and it was progress enough. “It’s a pack of lies.”

Green eyes flashed as they snapped up to focus on him, the closest thing to open confusion unsettling their depths. Even though the man’s interest was apparent, he refused to voice it.

If he was successful, he would have a bit more insight into what went on in those camps that made men lose their voices. Though from the faint glimmer of fire still in those eyes, perhaps Fritz had not yet mastered how to make men lose their desire to live.

“What they want me to do is to fill in all of the blanks that we have.” The man nodded in understanding, seeming to have expected at least something of the like. If anything he had probably been anticipating an interrogation to divulge all of the secret workings of the Nazi hoard. Which might come later, if Clint could work him in just the right way.

Already this was unlike any other mission Clint had ever done. His other information sagas had been a knock-down drag-out fight to make men divulge their most sworn and sacred oaths. That method in this instance would likely kill the man in question, if not be completely useless. If the rumors were true, nothing the Americans could promise would surmount what he had already suffered.

“What we want is to make this worth our while.”

That was the statement that finally managed to garner some genuine emotion. Those green eyes glinted, and the look on the man’s face could only be described as swimming with derision. “I know this may be a striking concept for you Americans,” he said, though his bitterness did not sit with the Americans themselves, he could tell, “but you are not the first to offer me such honeyed words.”

Clint flinched, which seemed to incite some pity from the man.

“So to prove your sincerity to me,” he said, his voice softer, “I want you to do what no one else has done for me.” Clint waited with heavy breath, wondering if he really had the authority to make such a decision, or such promises if it came to that. “I want you to do something for me in return.”

Damn.

 _God_ damn.

He chewed his lip for a moment, fretting. He knew that if he said no immediately he could be condemning every effort the Americans made from then on. Nothing they said or did would be able to convince this already war-torn man to overcome that initial betrayal. But he could never in good conscience sign on to any promise that he didn’t know the depths and breadths of.

“What is it that you want?” he asked, motioning with a lazy hand to the house around them. “We gave you a house. A nice one at that. We give you food, protection. We got you out of the war.”

The other man’s face contorted in a scowl. “ _You_ did nothing. Only by the will of a better man than any of you did I even make it to the Allied lines. Do not hold your material clout over me, _typisch Ami_. I have no fear of it.” He shut his mouth with a clack, and seemed to struggle with his control for a moment. Clint pitied him: his body was so gaunt and weak that he could not help his hands shaking. “A man wants only one thing, after _that_ ,” he continued, all the anger gone from him like the last of his energy. “The thing alone that is most important to him, that can survive such torture.”

Clint waited until their eyes met again before repeating his question. “What do you want?” He scrubbed a hand over his face and held up a hand to still any response. “I can’t promise you that I can get what you want, but I will promise this: as a man, not as a soldier, I promise to do everything in my power to see it done.”

The scrutiny he felt under that gaze was the only instance in his entire life where he welcomed the challenge to live up to it. For the first time, he wanted to meet someone’s expectations. He cared.

Maybe it was because this man was the only one he had ever met who upon first meeting seemed to be worthy of his own expectations, of his own dreams. His father had talked to him about what they had in their day called the Great War. Now there was this one, and it was the one to end them all if appearances were not at all deceiving. It was the war where the dreams of men died. It was only the dreams of God that were left, and this man had one.

“I believe you.” Clint would have sighed if his chest were not too tight to have allowed it. “As nothing more than a man myself, I believe it.”

Clint extended his hand, offering it to the man who held his future in the palm of his hand. The man’s gauntness betrayed the strength that he held even in those bony fingers.

“Can I ask for one piece of information before you tell me what you want? Just one?” Clint requested, and the pale man nodded. Shadows of suspicion lurked beneath his eyes. “Would you please tell me your name? The only marking we have for personal information in your file is that you’re from Norway. _Nothing_ else.”

What may have been a grin passed over the foreigner’s face. “My name is Loki,” he said, as if the name itself burdened him.

“Clint.” They withdrew their hands. “Now at least I don’t have to think of you as Mockingbird anymore.” That most definitely got Loki to smile, but it was a wan, emaciated thing. “Now you can tell me what you want.”

“What I want is very simple,” Loki assured quietly, though he was endearingly sincere. “I want my brother.”

 

As Clint found out, it was in no way even remotely close to _fucking easy_.

Unfortunately, that only made him want to accomplish it all the more. He had the bad habit of latching on to things like that. The resource managers at Otis were skeptical about his request but had promised to outsource to MI5 with the request. The night after that call, he had stayed up wondering over the carnage in Europe.

How many libraries had burned? How many files had been lost? How many subtle traces had been trampled by the feet of war? He didn’t know the answer, and that disturbed him. He wasn’t sure what the extent of the damage was, other than it could only be accurately described as catastrophic.

He looked that word up in the dictionary, catastrophic: momentously tragic. It fitted. It shouldn’t have.

When he went back to the Mockingbird House the next day, it was after having not slept a single wink. Apparently it showed in his face, because Loki looked at him with the most startled look on his face that Clint could have imagined. “What’s happened?” he asked, as if Hitler had reached his clawing fingers across the Atlantic to shred the last stronghold of the west.

“Nothing,” he defended quickly, holding his hands up to placate the poor man in front of him. He was unsure if Loki’s body could even handle hyperventilating, and he had no desire to test him to find out. “Nothing bad,” he clarified, and Loki nodded and stepped aside to let him in. “I contacted Otis.”

That earned him a blank look in response.

“It’s a military base nearby,” he explained. He followed Loki into the kitchen, where he was pleased to note the man had actually cracked into the cookies he had spent so much time on. “They’ll be the ones attempting to track down your brother. They have the resources.”

Loki nodded, and his face, though still relatively calm, had a sullen twinge to it. “What information do you want?” His voice was quiet. Clint guessed that it was because he had been forced to make such concessions before, though he could only hope with better reward now.

“Come sit with me,” Clint said. Loki’s eyes narrowed, but he consented and followed Clint back out into the living room. The agent flung himself down on the couch, settling in with a pillow behind his head. He even had his decency to kick off his shoes, which seemed to confuse Loki immensely as he sat back in the chair he had occupied the day previous.

The Norwegian looked down at him with an eyebrow raised. Again, Loki didn’t speak, but waited instead. Clint was beginning to like that about him: that he waited before acting. However, the dark rings that had hung under the man’s eyes yesterday were even more pronounced. Apparently sleep had escaped him as well.

Loki, upon realizing that the conversation was not going to start with an interrogation, slumped in his chair, letting out a weary sigh. He seemed half of his already nonexistent self. Upon watching the ginger way he handled himself and how he seemed to be aware of his own frailty, Clint wondered if a doctor had looked him over yet and recommended a safe regiment that would get him back to at least a healthy weight.

“You get groceries delivered right?”

Loki seemed startled by the question, and looked at him blankly for a moment. “Food was delivered when I arrived,” he stated blandly. “I do not know what arrangements will be made from now on.”

In spite of how comfortable he was on the couch, Clint decided that this needed to be investigated. Springing up, he bounced over the coffee table and strode into the kitchen. “Have you _made_ anything since you’ve been here?” He opened the refrigerator and peered inside. It was full to bursting with fresh food, all but a few sparing things untouched. The milk had been opened, but other than a few spaces that may have been naturally empty everything else was unperturbed.

“Scratch that,” he said, noting out of the corner of his eye that Loki had risen from his chair. “I can see that you really obviously haven’t. So I’m going to make you something!” His exclamation, and the enthusiasm behind it, was not lost on the Norwegian, and he looked back with a more amiable form of surprise on his face.

“That isn’t necessary,” the other man intoned. “I will get around to it sometime.”

Clint snorted, loudly for emphasis. “‘Sometime’ is right now, bucko.” In one arm he cradled a carton of eggs and a block of bright orange cheese. In the other hand he picked up the milk and moved towards the stove with all the conviction of a bachelor chef. “Besides, _I’m_ starving.”He only realized belatedly that may have not been the most poetic or respectful choice of words, given his current company.

Luckily Loki seemed not to mind, and only stood blithely by the doorway, looking on as Clint rummaged through the cupboards looking for a skillet. He found one, totally new, tucked in a neat stack next to a gargantuan soup pot. Where on earth the government had mustered up such nice wares he didn’t know, but it made him want to know why they figured it was such a worthwhile expense.

Snapping his fingers, he looked back to where Loki stood hovering, now closer to the fridge if only to peer about at what Clint was doing. He pointed to the towering teal menace of a fridge. “Would you see if there’s any ham in there? Maybe some bacon?”

Loki nodded, and pulled the refrigerator door open. He peered about as if seeing the actual contents of the fridge for the first time, a mild amount of wonderment in his eyes. Clint couldn’t help but think that he may not have seen that much food in one place since before the war, and it made him sickeningly sad.

Within a moment Loki pulled out a healthy slab of bacon, packaged carefully in paper with a marking tape to discern its contents. Loki handed the meat to Clint, as if he was unsure of what really to do with it, which though Clint genuinely doubted, he still found it a bit endearing.

“Why don’t you fry it?” he asked, digging down in the cupboards again to bring out a larger skillet. “The oven can fit both of us, I think.” He smiled at the other man, who nodded and took the pan from him.

As Clint mixed the milk and eggs in a small bowl, Loki set about unwrapping the bacon. When he had accomplished that, he cast a skeptical glance at the oven. He had the skillet perched over one of the burners, but his green eyes were flickering over the nobs.

“Jesus,” Clint groaned, smacking his forehead. “You don’t know how to use an oven?”

Loki scowled, but it came off much more pouting than he probably intended. “Understand, my stove in my own residence was a wood stove by _choice_ ,” he griped, but his tone only made Clint laugh.

He clapped a hand to Loki’s shoulder as gently as he could manage. “Don’t worry, old man, we’ll get you up to speed in no time. It’s as easy as tuning a radio.” With that he reached out and turned the dial for the burner Loki’s skillet was on. “Electric stoves, man. Gateway to the future.”

That actually earned him what may have been a very shallow chuckle. He counted it a victory. “Perhaps in a culinary sense,” Loki said, and set to laying the strips of bacon in the pan.

As soon as he was finished whisking the scrambled eggs together, he poured the mixture into his own pan and turned the heat up. He let the two of them stand in silence for a moment, chewing on his own cud and wondering what question would be fitting to ask Loki first.

After about two minutes he gave up trying to be deliberate.

“So I guess what I want to know most right now is what the hell you even do that has the U.S. government so damn interested.” He cast Loki a sideways smirk. “If you weren’t pretty bloomin’ valuable they wouldn’t have gone to such extensive lengths.”

Shrugging, Loki nodded. “I suppose that’s true.” The man tentatively searched for a fork in the nearby drawers, and upon finding one set to flipping the bacon. “How that is not already in your file is lost on me. I suppose that, since it obviously isn’t, it is as good a place to start as any.” Satisfied with his handiwork, Loki paused for a long moment, his face blank with thought as if he were searching his gray matter for the appropriate data.

“You’ll have to forgive me if I have to think on my words,” the Norwegian said after having apparently found his thought. “English is my fourth language, and I do sometimes jumble things up. The word I wanted, to explain succinctly what I do, is cryptography. At least that’s what I believe the Britons call it.”

Clint nearly split his own gut laughing. “So you’re a bloody cryptographer, and you don’t know how to run an electric stove?” he asked incredulously. Admittedly the cryptographers he had met were equally bizarre, if not more so. The Waterhouse fellow, another somewhat important cryptographer he had been told, had possessed an inane obsession with pipe organs if he had heard correctly. “I’m amazed the Axis didn’t fall to their knees.”

The grin that Loki gave as grim, but it was clear he understood the humor intended behind Clint’s comment.

Now knowing that about Loki’s character, Clint set to thinking while making sure his eggs didn’t end up burned. In the meager time it took them to finish, he at least figured that Britain had a reason to be upset with them for snatching the Mockingbird file first. From what it had sounded like, the Americans had only just scarcely won the race to pluck him out of the war zone.

Spooning his eggs into a bowl he had snuck from a cabinet, he looked over to find Loki only about halfway through the slab of bacon they’d uncovered. “That’s probably good. We can wrap up the rest for later.” Loki nodded his agreement, and while Clint rewrapped the rest of the uncooked meat he finished the last few strips he’d been frying.

When they had both settled at the table with their food, Clint shoveling Tobasco-drenched eggs into his mouth like it would help him ward off the plague while Loki plucked carefully at his bacon, he let his thoughts wander again. What kind of situation had they found Loki in anyway, with such a horrible condition it couldn’t have been anything but some poor soul’s worst nightmare. Once he’d finished his plate, and gotten the feeling in his tongue back, he looked intently across the table

Loki shifted under his gaze, but did not let it keep from continuing to eat small mouthfuls. Clint rested his elbow on the table. “So you’re a Norwegian cryptographer, looking for a brother named Thor Odinson. That’s not bad for only having known you since yesterday.”

The man across from him smirked, shrugging idly. “You could have done much worse.” There was a twinge of foreboding memory in his voice, and again Clint was struck with the feeling that someone along the line of Loki’s experience in this war had done just that. “I appreciate your Americans’ brevity, in the least.”

“Glad to hear it,” Clint said, picking a toothpick from a small jar on the table and getting the fat out of his teeth. “Even more glad to notice you actually ate some of my cookies. I slaved all night.”

“I’m sure you did,” Loki replied drily.

The agent sneered at his guest, but with no ill intent in mind. “Well, we also know now that you do actually eat,” he said, jabbing his toothpick in Loki’s general direction, “much against all appearances.”

That did get Loki’s face to darken, and he looked away for a moment, one of his long-fingered hands drumming anxiously on the table. Clint could tell that he’d crushed an egg-shell of some sort with that comment, but had no idea whether it was indeed an egg-shell or a landmine instead.

After a deep breath Loki turned back to him. “Believe me, this is now how I would prefer to present myself. Unfortunately, I had less choice in the matter than I am fond to admit.”

“See,” Clint said, trying to settle his back into the kitchen chair with little success, “you’re really going to have to explain that one. I understand you’re originally from Norway, but that leaves a big cavernous blank between whenever you left and whenever the Allies found you in Switzerland.”

Loki rubbed at his forehead as if Clint’s statement wounded his intellect. As a matter of ironic fact it may have done so, but that was why Clint was there. They were encountering so many things that didn’t make sense, that didn’t add up. Hell, most of what Hitler spouted, unless the translators were playing one hell of a sick game, didn’t make sense.

“Please,” Clint pleaded. “We’re just trying to understand.”

“ _Gud hjelpe meg_.” Loki withdrew his hand, looking more pale and drawn than Clint had ever seen him, which he believed to have been an impossible feat. Loki remained quiet, his hand over his mouth as he sat thinking. Finally, he said quietly, “I did not _leave_ Norway.”

“Nor,” he continued with a humorless laugh, “did I _leave_ Germany. The same could be said for Switzerland. In all my travels of late, I have never been wittingly involved. I have in all circumstances been _taken_.” Clint let him go quiet this time, a stone sinking fast in his gut. That heaviness deserved to be there, because though the Americans had attempted to have more hospitality about it, they had nonetheless done what everyone else had done up until that point and forced a man unto the ends of an earth he may not have ever wanted to see.

Loki finally set his hand down on the table and away from his face. His lips were pressed in a thin line. “Hitler’s incursion into Norway was a purposeful show of power. I had hidden myself away in the fjords, hoping that some stray SS dog would not find me. I succeeded for a time, and spent my time listening in on the faceless kiss-and-tell repartee between the Britons and the Führer as they attempted to gain the upper hand on one another.”

“If Alan Turing had not methodized the bombe, the Allied Forces would have remained in the dark for the rest of the war,” he went on. “The Germans knew that their Enigma machines, an artifact of the Great War, and their cyphers had been leaked to the French and British government forces in the late 1930s. In response the Germans decided to get clever, and increased the complexity of their machines, leaving those leaked cyphers completely useless.”

Clint nodded. “So the information they had didn’t do them any good when they started needing it the most.”

“That is where Turing and numerous others came into play. I knew about the existence of Bletchley Park, their cryptography headquarters, complete with the bombe, well before they had begun enlisting American cryptographers, your Navajo included.” He gave a sad smile. “I had broken Mr. Turing’s methods long before and communicated with him about what I could pick up from the eastern bloc countries. He seemed most obliged.”

Clint swallowed a sizeable lump in his throat. Anyone caught philandering with the enemy, or at least anyone the SS perceived to be the enemy, was due for a bloodbath sooner than they were for reward. “So they came after you when they went into Norway,” he finished. “I can’t imagine they were terribly pleased with you.”

A sharp glimmer danced in Loki’s green eyes. “They barely knew I existed, let alone knew what I was up to. In that regard my equipment and my methods were enough to protect me from the immediate wrath of the SS. They were still angry, nonetheless, to find that I was indeed quite a good cryptographer who had defied stepping forward to aid the Führer.”

“But they needed you.” Loki nodded to his statement, and Clint stretched his toes in his socks in what was a rather ridiculous nervous habit. “They didn’t have to exactly treat you like royalty, but they couldn’t afford to kill you. Not with what you knew and how important cryptography is to this war.”

“Quite right.” Loki poked his fork at the small lumps of egg that he had not had the stomach to eat. He was quiet for a long time, his jaw working without producing any words. Clint got the feeling that wherever Loki ended up was where he had somehow managed to get out of against all odds. “As I understand it the Allied powers have little to know knowledge of what the Germans are doing,” he murmured.

He raised a brow, wondering what that was supposed to mean. “In what way?” he asked. “We know the German’s movements, unfortunately a lot of the time only after they’ve attacked.”

Loki shook his head, still seeming to chew on his words. “I mean to their own,” he said to the table. “Hitler has an intense vendetta against a number of demographics found in the German population. His intent, now that he has the power to do so, is to not only expunge them, but to eradicate them.” The man clenched his eyes closed and breathed slowly for a moment. “The methods are most… unheard of.”

“I think we have at least a little idea of those methods. They’re… camps, right? Internment camps. Reports have come in of our captured soldiers being held in them.”

A bitter scowl sat on Loki’s lips. “ _Internment_ is a weak word,” he said sharply. “They are death camps, disguised under the façade of being labor camps. Their only purpose is to herd in populations, starve them of will and spirit until death, and burn them from all remembrance.” Clint could almost tell that Loki had a bad taste in his mouth saying those words.

In an almost subconscious show of respect for the subject, Clint sat up straight in his chair and folded his hands on the table. “How that possibly be?” he asked, rubbing his forehead and trying to discern if there could even be truth in such a description.

“I had the fortune of getting to watch it happen,” Loki replied lightly, though the expression on his sallow features was dark. “After I was bagged from my home in Norway I was transported to a town with one of the more prominent camps just outside. Their numbers were populated by numerous political prisoners as well as the innumerable unfortunate local masses who fell into Hitler’s cross-hairs.”

Clint noted how severely Loki had begun to sag under the weight of his own thoughts. He couldn’t blame him precisely, but he knew that if it continued on for too long it would become a physical strain on his thin frame. Sorrow, as all men knew inherently, could be just as damaging as a sword.

He stood, and walked around the table. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some cookies and go out into the living room.”

Loki only looked on at him in surprise for a moment, some small flicker of dismay seeming to pass through him. Clint cut him off before that disappointment could morph into something more severe. “I’m not discounting you,” he hoped to promise. “I just know that this is a heavy subject for audience and storyteller. You need a break, and I need to sit and absorb for a minute. Can we do that?”

The Norwegian nodded and rose, and Clint stood by to make sure that the other man would not fall, having ignored his own emotional limits while spinning his tale. The agent got the feeling that if what Loki said was true, it would be a tale many times repeated in the years to come. That was, he supposed, if anyone actually won this damnable war in the end.

It saddened him to think that perhaps no one would.

 

Clint did not return the next day, but instead spent it kicking his dusty heels around the streets of Boston to clear his head. The city still felt more alive to him than the wind shifting in the trees, and it comforted him that somewhere things were not quite so dark as they seemed.

Sitting down by the harbor made him wonder how many beautiful spring days Germany had seen, in spite of all of the evil misdeeds going on under those lidless blue skies. Not all defeats were in the rain and not all victories in the sun. History and circumstance were ironic but poetic mistresses, and their choices were to be predicted or dictated by none.

Hell, it was the height of springtime in New England, and here he was with haunted dreams of skeleton-like men shuffling through the dust towards the graves they had dug for themselves. He wasn’t sure he could stomach a greater irony than that.

Once he had wasted enough of his time and money on more than a couple lobster salad sandwiches he hopped on the bus. This time, however, he diverted to Otis instead of going to visit Loki. He wanted to have a typographer enter the notes he had taken so that the file he was supposed to be investigating started filling out a little bit.

While he was there, he looked up the Turing fellow that Loki had mentioned, spending the majority of his evening poring over the, to what him seemed asinine, gibberish that places like Bletchley Park spewed out about cryptography and the theory behind it.

He went to bed with a headache and the feeling that it would forever just be beyond him.

Before he returned to Loki’s little house on the Cape, he decided that the man could probably do with some amenities of his own. The house was furnished, but its decoration and general hominess sparing. Clint, however, was no housewife, and thus settled himself on the fact that he had very little clue what decorations in a house made it more than a house with stuff in it.

He figured that he would know it when he felt it, and he felt it later that day when he passed by an old secondhand book shop downtown. In his apartment back in New York, though he wasn’t exactly a scholar, he had kept plenty of books around. He always felt that they seasoned the place, made it a bit more self-aware.

When he left the shop, it was with a crate of books almost too big to fit into his arms. He had done his best to find nice, hard bound copies of things. In some cases he had succeeded, in others failed. But there was one lavender-bound volume on top that he was most proud of, and most excited to have Loki read. He was fairly certain that the Norwegian would not have had read it previously.

He got more than a few passing looks when he brought his crate onto the bus that day, but he opted to ignore them until an elderly woman sat next to him and inquired what he was intending to do with so many books.

“I’m giving them to someone,” he said, because that was about as simple an explanation as he could manage, and he didn’t feel like attempting to beat back all of the rest of the details that would rush out if he were asked to elaborate further.

Thankfully the old woman only nodded with a sage little smile on her face and proceeded to fall asleep on his shoulder. She roused just before her stop, which was long before his, and gave him a loving pat on the leg when she tottered out.

She made him wonder how his own grandmother was doing, or if she was even alive anymore. He doubted it, and doubted even more that when she passed she actually remembered that he had been her grandson. Hell, she probably would have called the President her grandson with how far gone she was by the end, but Clint could only find that all the more reason to love her. She had gone out like she had come in: stark raving mad.

Someday he hoped to go out much the same, if he managed to live that long. Or if the world hadn’t ended by then, and a very small part of him was sure that it would.

When he finally made it to Loki’s door he was heaving from hauling he crate from the bus stop. Loki opened the door for him immediately, eyeing the box with unbridled curiosity. It was a small victory, Clint concluded, but a victory nonetheless.

“I thought you could use something to read other than the newspaper,” he explained, having left the box and all of its treasure by Loki’s chair in the living room. Where the man was going to put them all eventually Clint wasn’t sure, but for the moment it was not his problem to deal with. “It gets a bit depressing after a while.”

Much to his pleasure, Loki immediately picked up the volume that Clint had purposefully left on the top of the crate. He opened the cover, running his thumb over the pages as they turned past, smiling in a way that seemed as unguarded as the scarred man could manage.

“This is wonderful,” he said, keeping that first book held in his grasp as he rooted through the rest. “My understanding of English literature is lacking greatly. I look forward to going through these.” He straightened and looked to Clint with genuine gratitude. “Thank you.”

Clint threw back a saucy grin at him. “Anything to see you smile,” he said over-emphatically, and Loki rolled his eyes. “But I should warn you ahead of time, some of those are American authors.”

Loki looked at him confusedly for a moment, before seeming to realize Clint’s statement. “I was more referring to the English language,” he corrected with a grin, “rather than the English people.” He looked down at the volume in his hands, opening the front cover. Clint watched as his eyes flickered over the publisher’s page. “This is one of the American authors you mentioned, yes?”

The agent nodded. “A friend of mine mentioned that it was good, and so I thought you might be interested in it. It’s pretty new.”

Loki’s hands stilled as he gazed down at the page. “I noted.” Clint almost entirely missed what he said. “1940,” he continued, his voice trailing off. “Norway fell. I never saw much of what that came to mean.”

He could only stand there, looking at the other man and shifting nervously on his feet. “Some things war can’t stop,” he said, and Loki glanced up at him with distant skepticism. He nodded towards the book with a hopeful smile. “Even war can’t stop literature. The world was going to hell and _someone_ still had the guts to stand up and write.”

That earned him a wan but slowly brightening smile from his companion. “I suppose so,” he said, closing the book with care and setting it back with the others.

Clint beckoned him with a wave into the kitchen, and Loki followed him as quiet as a shadow. “One of these days we’ll have to go for a swim at the pond down the street,” he said, rooting through the fridge until he found a crisp apple. He held it between his teeth as he made to find one for Loki as well. “Once summer hits the water should be perfect for swimming.”

The last part of his statement, he realized belatedly, was completely muffled and unintelligible having been spoken around his apple. Judging by the look on Loki’s face, being one of complete but amused bewilderment, it had come out as nothing better than spare mumbles.

He tossed the apple to his companion, who caught it in a clean one-handed swipe. Clint noted the ease of hand-eye coordination with interest, and decided to include it later in the file to see if it was due to anything of interest. Removing the apple from his own mouth after a juicy bite, he repeated himself. “I said, once summer hits the water should be perfect for swimming.”

Loki tilted his head, looking at Clint curiously. “Are you sure that you or anyone else will have the time to escort me?” he asked, the earnestness in his voice making Clint feel a pang of guilt for possibly not being able to live up to his own offer. “Not to show a lack of faith in the promises of your government, but I believe you all have much better things to be doing.”

The agent laughed, and nodded in agreement. “I can understand your hesitation.” He tossed the apple in his hands, catching it without ever letting the bite mark land in his palm. “But you wouldn’t be here if this wasn’t something better to be doing.”

The Norwegian crossed his arms over his chest, apple still in hand, and leaned against the counter. “You’ll have to explain that to me. I still haven’t been strictly informed why I’ve been being cared for so lavishly. The Americans, for the most part, are not stupid. In such tense times, they do not do anything for no reason.” At that, he took a very emphatic but lazy bite out of his apple.

He stood pondering for a moment, wondering over what protocol he would be breaking to tell Loki anything of the sort. It was only a logical assumption to think that Loki had some level of security clearance to have gotten this far, but Clint wasn’t sure how much or how little he could be trusted with.

Then again, he wasn’t sure how big of an issue it was to tell someone why he was even there when he could have been just about anywhere else instead.

“Fuck it,” he said, snatching his apple out of the air. “I might as well tell ya. If it was the wrong choice it’ll come back on my head and not yours, since it’s a pretty standard question to ask. The truth is the Americans are fine with working with the rest of the Allies for the sake of this war. The fact also is that currently all of our cryptographers are over in Britain working tirelessly at Bletchley Park to break the center of communications in Europe. A few are still in the Pacific Rim area working on doing the same for the Asiatic conflicts.” He took a bite and chewed it as carefully as he was chewing his words. “What we want is someone to stay continental, but to be able to keep an eye and an ear on everyone else.”

A look of keen dawning slithered over Loki’s drawn features, and he might have actually smiled. “Including Britain,” he said, seeming to slyly approve of the idea in spite of it likely going against many of the people he had communicated and worked with.

Clint nodded. “Others as well,” he defended, holding up a finger. “Even though we’re technically on the same side as Russia, it doesn’t mean we have to like it.”

Loki only rolled his eyes, making to walk out into the living room. Instead of settling back down into his normal chair, he instead stood before the sliding doors leading to the back yard, looking towards the forest lining the properties. “I get the feeling that you and the Reds are not likely to get along anywhere in the near future,” he said, and there was a tone of both sadness and bitterness in his voice.

That surprised the agent, and he followed Loki curiously. “You’re not Russian, though,” he said. “I can’t imagine that Norway has a particularly fond relationship with Russia.”

“That’s because you Americans believe that no one can have a fond relationship with Russia,” Loki replied swiftly, but without malice. “You may not be wrong, but that does not make you right to the extent that you believe you are.”

Clint held up his hands, ducking his head. “Hey, I don’t have anything against the Russians. I’ve met some actually, most of them completely sans-marbles, but you know. I’m sure we seem the same way to them. One of ‘em’s a friend of mine. Well, I guess she’s a friend.” Loki looked at him, intrigued. “She’s one of the best spies I’ve ever met.”

“You collaborated,” Loki finished, seeming impressed, though Clint couldn’t be sure. There was still a steely glint of something in Loki’s eyes that made him wonder just how dangerous the man was, and just how much he wasn’t telling them. If he returned fully to health, there was the possibility that Loki could be quite the force to be reckoned with. “I can understand that necessity.”

Now it was Clint’s turn to be intrigued. “I realize the Germans held you hostage, and undoubtedly made you work for them. You wouldn’t still be alive if you weren’t useful, under the conditions that you implied. But you had to get out somehow, and not on your own.”

Loki nodded, his brows raised. “Indeed. I owe my life, and likely many more, to one German soldier. I never knew his first name, only his last. He was _Kommandant_ Lang, and he was one of the greatest liars that I have ever met.” There was almost a thread of pride in Loki’s voice, woven in beneath the sadness. “I came to know that during the Dieppe Raid he came into contact with a British spy brigade called 30AU, which was covertly after an Enigma machine. They did not retrieve one, but he did provide them intel which eventually lead to my escape.”

Clint whistled, moving to open the door and stand out on the covered porch for some fresh air. He left the door open, not only for Loki, but to get some fresh air into the house while they were at it. “That must have been an incredibly risky move on his part, going against everyone and everything he was supposed to be fighting for.” Clint looked to Loki, who still stood at the very brink of the door. “He must have been a good man.”

“A good man?” Loki parroted, a look of detached surprise on his face. “No. There are no good men in a war like this. He still behaved like any good _Kommandant_. He shot and killed those who he was told to shoot and kill. He tortured those he was told to torture, destroyed what he was told to destroy. It also just so happened that, much against what his comrades thought, he happened to have both a heart and a brain.” Loki shook his head, taking another tentative barefooted step out of the house. “No, there are no good men in war. But there are men who can do both good and bad things in war.”

Clint paused, looking up at the sky. Dim gray clouds had settled in from the coastline, and it slowly began to drizzle around them. Safe under the eaves of the porch roof, it did not reach them, but its freshness was not lost on the air around them. “What about after?” Clint asked quietly.

“After what?”

“What about after the war?” he said again, looking to gauge Loki’s reaction. “Can there be good men after war?”

Loki just stared at him. “I would not know,” he replied, and the only thing Clint could be thankful for in that moment was the other man’s honesty. “If I live to see it, I shall think to tell you.”

 

Clint was a man of simple needs, and generally simple thoughts. That was not to say stupid or uneducated thoughts, but most things in his life and in his lifestyle tended to lay out in front of him in simple, uncomplicated ways. He viewed the world as just a layered simplicity, and so viewed himself the same.

So when he woke up one morning in May, hot and incredibly bothered by a dream featuring a very characterized figure with bright green eyes, he was startled to think that there may have been something in his life and in himself that was not as simple as he had thought. He declined to visit the house of the figure the green eyes belonged to, because he simply could not fathom having to do so without blushing madly and blurting out his secrets.

He had the very unfortunate habit of doing things like that, and he got the idea that Loki’s prim little mind would be less than welcome to the idea of learning just how Clint’s subconscious decided to treat him in the context of dreams.

Instead he did what every lonely man on the planet would and promptly went and purchased some company for that evening. Or, rather, he went to a club, bought a pretty young blond a drink, and promptly had dinner with her only to do absolutely nothing else.

Perhaps he’d gotten rather bad at the propositioning women thing since Natasha had nearly beaten him to death after a much failed attempt at propositioning her. He considered himself better for that horrible encounter, but now it made him wonder if it had not flipped some proverbial switch in him. The switch that other soldiers talked about having experienced after so long away from any form of woman.

The issue with that theory was that Clint was one of the few able-bodied men left on the public continental United States and had no shortage of women at his disposal, on top of the fact that he had never really seen the difference between preferences of bedmate as a distinctive issue.

The only personal issue that he had with it being Loki was the fact that it was a distinct interference of work and… well, pleasure. In recent weeks it had really almost turned into leisure, this silly little assignment of his. In spite of that his superiors had been pleased with his progress, not only in fleshing out the details of the file but also weaning Loki back into health. After one particular day of irritation, Clint had called in a nurse from Otis to come and examine Loki so they could finally have a definitive health file for him. The man had been less than pleased by Loki’s emaciation at the start, but after Clint had explained that the man had gained at least fifteen pounds since his arrival, he lessened his judgments somewhat.

He had also advised Clint with a fair amount of believable threat that if Loki degraded at all, it would be on his head. Clint had taken the initiative to believe him, and to start feeding Loki ice cream on all occasions applicable. He discovered thereupon that the man liked nothing better than classic vanilla ice cream with fresh raspberries.

What worried Clint was that he and Loki were swiftly reaching the point that the government had been wanting all along. The mystery behind Loki’s story was no longer a mystery, save for the very end, and they had begun to care very little about that last details in comparison to what Loki could offer them intellectually. If what he claimed was true, he could easily build a machine that could be adapted to filter both Enigma and bombe frequencies. Having such equipment and methods at the disposal of the United States would be imperative not only in the war, but after.

Clint hated the arrival of the day when Loki would have to cease luxuriating in an early but well-earned retirement, simply out of principal for what the man had been through. Unfortunately, having gotten to know Loki’s nature, he also could sense that the man was getting bored with his confinement and his brain would soon melt out his ears if he didn’t find something to entertain him.

Deciding to get himself and his embarrassment under a lid, he visited Loki the next day, intent upon fleshing out just what Loki would be willing to do for the government. He had a great amount of confidence walking in until he realized that the government’s one promise had not yet been unfulfilled, and until the time that they made true their word, Loki would have every right to deny them.

Loki’s brother was still the lynchpin in their deal, and the fact that after several months Clint had still heard nothing did not bode well for their future.

He brought ice cream and fresh raspberries just in case he needed to cajole a bit of cooperation out of Loki for the time being. When he showed up at the doorstep with cartons in hand and an apologetic look on his face, Loki only laughed at him and snatched the raspberries away.

“You’re repenting,” he said, still barring Clint from entering the house by standing in its doorway. In spite of the fact that Loki was quite a bit taller than him, a fact which Clint had only learned when the man had been forced to stand up straight for measuring by the attending nurse, he was still much less heavy. Clint could likely have taken him in one tackle, but the ensuing broken bones, and possibly tears, were more than his already guilty conscience could handle. The man had only just gotten his first haircut to even out the shag the SS had made his hair into, and tears on that pretty refined face would simply not do. “What have you done to me now?’

Clint paused for a moment, shifting on his feet. “Reporting on my promise,” he said, and Loki looked at him with thinly veiled interest. “I contacted Otis this morning to see where we are with locating your brother. They said that they would call me back this evening.” Loki’s expression did not change, and a pregnant pause weighted the space between them.

“Um… I guess also I want to know what you’d be willing to do for the U.S. government because we’re getting to the point where you’re getting bored out of your mind and your file is almost complete but I don’t want to make you do anything without the equal promise of reward which is why I feel really bad that we still haven’t delivered on our initial promise while I’m obligated to monger around for what you can do for us otherwise,” he blurted.

Loki smiled at him obligingly, but failed to say anything for a while. After a time he stepped aside, and let Clint sulk his way inside, carton of ice cream still under his arm. The Norwegian was far too patient and forgiving for this to be a good sign.

The cryptographer followed after him into the hallway were they both stood leaning against the walls across from one another.

“You’re right, of course.” Loki was looking at him with a smug grin on his face, one that Clint couldn’t decide whether the liked or hated. “Other than my frankly saintly treatment, and free house, and supplied food, and constant protection, and good company, I have nothing to owe you Yanks.”

A little glimmer of hope twinkled in Clint’s heart.

With a sigh, Loki shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I would like to extort you, but I find the odds of my success far outweighed by the odds of my failure. In this instance, I find that I can get much more out of cooperating in what small ways I can.” His green eyes landed on Clint, and the agent resisted the urge to fidget. “In addition, I might actually like you as a person, and doing you favors would be something a friend might do for another.”

Clint cocked his head to one side. “Are you sure you want to risk being my friend?” he teased. “With the big bad government at my back?”

“Are you sure you want to be mine?” Loki returned. “With the big bad Nazis at mine?”

Holding up the carton of swiftly softening ice cream, Clint nodded towards the porch. “Shall we discuss the matter over ice cream? I’m sure that any conflict between East and West can be solved thus.”

“Not if you’re allergic to raspberries.” The Norwegian shook his pilfered carton of fruit, and Clint couldn’t help but laugh like the idiot he was. He was thankful that in spite of his fears, Loki had not changed under the implication of a change in the terms of their meetings.

And even if it wasn’t exactly a friendship they established, and even if it didn’t stay a friendship for the entirety of their knowing one another, he was glad that for the time being things did not have to change as quickly as the world seemed to want them to.

 

That weekend, he got the call from Otis that turned over everything he ever thought was possible. He knew Europe was a mess: _everyone_ knew Europe was a mess. Finding someone successfully was as bout as likely as finding a singular tarnished needle amid the entire stock of a hay farm.

But for some reason, that had not kept the U.S. and their partners in crime from fishing out one Thor Odinson from the hellish squall. Clint could not have mustered being anything but impressed even if he tried. It had been his task, according to Otis, to retrieve Thor from his flight entering at Logan Airport, and to conduct him in whatever fashion he deemed best to the current residence of his brother.

He could never have imagined a less helpful set of instructions.

What they expected him to do was a complete mystery. Was telling Loki ahead of time wise? Would he not be able to sleep or eat or stop pacing the living room until Clint got there with what he had so long ago promised? Or should he just show up at the door with the man of the hour hovering behind him nervously?

He could not postulate which circumstance would force Loki to drop dead sooner, a potential outcome he was incredibly not-fond of as far as things went.

Half an hour after he got that call from Otis, he got another call from an entirely different set of Otis staff. This time, instead of crushingly joyous news, it was merely crushing. The attending nurse that had been keeping an eye on Loki all throughout his stay reported to a woman at the call center that on his routine check-up Loki had turned out to be incredibly sick.

Guilt clouded Clint, as he had not been there in the past few days to monitor the man’s tolerance of the descending Cape fall. And though the burning bushes were beginning their short but beautiful reign outside, it was also descending into the early flu season. Loki’s health, though improved, could not account for such strength as to avoid getting sick.

What worried Clint most was that, given Loki’s persisting gaunt, he may not yet have acquired the strength to persist in fighting off a more terrible sickness.

It was he that ended up pacing, all the while he was forced to wait at Logan for Thor’s incoming flight. The woman from the call center informed him that the Loki’s nurse would remain looking after him until Clint himself arrived to look after him with the set instructions he would leave behind.

Relaying the news to Thor was an even less palatable prospect when he faced the man down for the first time. The other Norwegian, which Otis had described briefly as “tall and blond”, outlived that description by about two feet and three hundred pounds. He was easily two-and-a-half of Clint, but there was no mistaking him as soon as Clint saw him.

Though he and Loki looked almost nothing alike, there was something remaining in their postures that spoke of a mother who taught them how to stand up straight and tall, like good boys. Wanting to please their mother, they obliged, and stood in good grace as well as they could in spite of the burdens the world had laid on their shoulders.

He had raised a hand, ushering the man over to him so that they could speak before they proceeded into what was likely one of the most unfortunate scenes Clint had ever faced in his technical career.

“You are the one the man Turing told me about,” Thor said, his English much more heavily accented than Loki’s. “Clint Barton, who has been caring for my brother.” Clint could discern the exact moment when even saying the word ‘brother’ aloud broke Thor’s heart.

The joy in his smile as he grasped Clint’s hand in a cemented grip was almost painful.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s me. Look, Thor, I know that you’ve come a really long way, but I need to tell you something before we go see your brother.” Thor’s stormy blue eyes fixed on him sharply, and he held up his hands in defense. “He’s okay, he’s just sick at the moment. I’m not sure how bad, but he’s been okay up until literally this week.”

Thor only nodded; fidgeting for a moment in a way that Clint thought was hilariously reminiscent of a twelve-year-old. After a moment of seeming to gather his words, he ventured to ask, “My brother, how… _is_ he?”

Clint immediately understood what he meant, and declined to answer in his own attempt to find a proper way to respond. When Loki had arrived he had been nothing more than a skeleton, literally a ghost of a man with nothing more than the life left in his eyes to keep him a mobile creature. He had improved, but that haunting remnant of far too many long days spent in a silent hell clung greedily about his throat on rainy days.

“He’s alive,” Clint answered, and Thor remained looking at him quite uncertainly. “In spite of everything, and that’s the thing I think we both have to remember. He’s here, and that’s enough.”

He understood why the implication that the Loki awaiting them was very much not the Loki that had left Thor unexpectedly in Norway shook the larger man so much. Hell, he could barely fathom what Loki must have been like before the war and everything that had happened to him. It seemed to have become such an immovable part of him that an image of him without it could only really seem incomplete.

Then again, Clint wasn’t really sure one could walk out of a war like this and still be a whole person. Somehow or another, he believed Loki to have managed it anyway.

When he turned to go Thor gripped the elbow of his sleeve like a lost child, looking around the massive string of terminals in wonder. Clint wondered if he had ever seen anything like it in Norway or wherever else he had been during the course of the war. From what it sounded like he had been in England consulting with Loki’s other cryptographer buddies, probably in an attempt to locate his wayward brother.

The drive was a long one, but the fact that Otis had loaned him a car helped tremendously. This time there was no waiting for the bus or another agent to come and retrieve him. Thor barely fit into the passenger’s seat of the little sedan, and Clint, in spite of his seriousness, could not help but laugh. Thor gazed at him with wide eyes for a moment, before seeming to realize the ridiculousness of the situation.

Then Thor laughed along with him, and in that moment Clint felt like he had connected with someone on the same childish level that kept people loving each other in spite of the most gruesome circumstances. By the time he and Thor had gotten themselves together, they were both out of breath and misty-eyed.

Driving out to the house seemed much less strenuous after that. He and Thor chatted idly about the weather differences between Europe and New England, how the cars were small and strange no matter where Thor went, and how Clint could never get used to foreign food no matter how much borscht Natasha made him choke down.

The attending nurse’s old gray jeep was parked outside, and when they arrived Thor nodded to it with a quiet nod of approval. “Don’t get your hopes up, bub,” he said with a sad shrug. “That old clunker we came in isn’t even mine!” Thor laughed at him, but did not seem disappointed.

Without knocking like he usually would, he simply ventured inside after ringing the doorbell briefly. Thor followed him tentatively, looking around the shadowy house with the curiosity of a truly protective older brother. When his eyes settled on Loki’s sprawling collection of books, which Clint had only ever added to when he could, a broad smile spread across his bright face.

“This is indeed an abode of my brother’s,” he said fondly, looking to Clint with sureness in his eyes. “Never in any place but a library have I ever found so many books as in my brother’s presence.”

Clint beckoned Thor to follow him upstairs, where the house’s two small bedrooms resided. More than once Clint had slept on the couch in the spare room when he and Loki had stayed up late talking. He was sure that all the clunking they made while going upstairs would have alerted the nurse that they were there.

Sure enough, as soon as they had gotten into the hallway, the hoarse voice of the nurse sounded from Loki’s room. “You had damn well better have a good reason for being late, Barton.”

The agent cracked the door open and peered in. The graying nurse technician looked up at him over the rim of his glasses. Bruce looked much more humored than he sounded, and the little smirk on his lips relieved Clint immensely. The man had a hell of a temper on him when he got his boxers in a bunch.

Much to his relief, Loki also seemed to be much better humored than the nurse had implied with his phone call. He was sitting up, a bit gray around the eyes and red around the nose, holding what looked to be a copy of _Time_ in his lap.

For a moment he couldn’t understand why Loki had gone so stock still, but then he felt Thor’s hand on his shoulder and remembered the rather minor detail of who exactly he had brought with him.

He jumped out of the way before Thor could trample him on the way to his brother, sitting by Bruce on the ottoman of the armchair Loki usually sat and wrote in. But Thor didn’t bluster in after him, he only stood at the door as if unsure he should even enter. Then all of a sudden the massive blond Norwegian was balling like a child, and all but crawled into Loki’s lap. The bed groaned pitifully underneath his added weight, and Loki was left looking startled and bewildered and altogether unsure of whether to laugh or cry.

Eventually the slighter brother opted for both, and buried his face into the crook of Thor’s neck, tears in his eyes but laughter shaking his narrow shoulders.

“ _Du nydelig tosk_ ,” Loki muttered long after Thor’s tears had quieted. It seemed that in spite of everything, and the standard, it was the younger brother comforting the older. Thor lifted himself, sitting up and looking at his brother critically for the first time.

Before Thor could ask anything, Loki looked to him with an intense seriousness. “Thor, what became of my equipment?” he asked, a steadying hand rested on his brother’s bulky forearm. Clint would have thought the question a bit calloused, if it had not been such an integral part of Loki’s work and livelihood.

Thor smiled sadly at him, and held Loki’s hand gingerly, as if afraid to break him. Clint had felt similarly when he first met Loki, and could understand that Thor knew an entirely different Loki, a much healthier, livelier one. “After I found you gone, I destroyed it. You had a last message from the man Turing, and I went to him in England to get his help in finding you. He… did not know where you had gone, but he was willing to keep me safe.”

Loki looked like he couldn’t decide whether to smile or to grimace in envy. “You and Allan Turing,” he said incredulously. “I would never have fathomed such a thing should I have had a thousand years to prepare for it.”

Thor only laughed amicably. “He would not have taken me into the midst of Bletchley Park if it had not been for you, brother. I only wish that I could have done more to assist you in the way you so assisted me.”

The outright glare that Loki shot at Thor then nearly made Clint’s blood run cold. “Not on your life,” he scolded vehemently. “I would rather have died in that camp than have you traipsing around trenches on your own. Never, _ever_ wish for death to settle a score. It is not worth it.”

Thor was crying, and could only manage to nod silently while the words worked a knot in his throat. Bruce let out a stiff breath next to him, and he knew that the doctor would have said much the same. He had already seen too many men wounded beyond recognition, as well as too few to promise any kind of victory, no matter who came out on top.

The losses were innumerable, and Clint understood Loki’s fury towards anyone who would wish to be involved. Hell, America hadn’t wanted to be involved, and they likely would have held out for longer if the east hadn’t made the first strike.  He was sure that people felt the same: Loki had held out and away from the conflict for as long has he could manage, before the SS got to him first.

“Would you guys like something to eat maybe?” Clint asked after a while, and all three of the men in the room looked to him as if the thought had popped out of thing air and gone dancing around the room like a gremlin. “I, personally, am starving, that’s all.”

Seemingly agreeing with Clint in spite of its host’s manners, Thor’s stomach growled so loudly Clint would have vied that he felt it rumble the floor. “I too am somewhat famished,” the big burly man admitted with the dusting of a bashful blush on his cheeks.

Loki rolled his eyes at his brother, but looked to Clint with a warming amount of softness in his face. “I would appreciate a cup of tea, and I will have some of whatever you do make.”

“You trust me that much?” Clint asked, intending to tease.

The pale Norwegian looked to his brother, and then back to Clint was a positively heartbreaking smile. “More than anyone.”

 

Thor was moved to Boston. Clint wasn’t sure why, but he was pretty sure it had something to do with Loki hijacking his phone and making a few promises and or threats of his own to assure it.

Clint personally thought it would be useful: Thor had helped Loki make his cryptograph equipment, and could do so again. With the two of them working together, the brain and the brawn, he was sure that the U.S. would have a machine so powerful that it couldn’t be matched.

Even though he was technically finished with his file, and had “strong-armed” Loki into being a G-Man, he kept visiting the Mockingbird House. His superiors never questioned him, in fact they offhandedly encouraged it. Keeping their guests happy would keep them motivated, and keeping them motivated would keep them working.

He helped Loki remodel his basement into a home office during the winter of 1943. The whole place was strewn with cables and equipment he had no clue how to program or use. But as he slowly drug in the crates of implements that Otis had delivered upon Loki’s request, he got the idea that Loki was perfectly at home.

He liked the idea of Loki being perfectly at home.

He liked the idea even more when he happened to be in that home, being a part of it, feeling that comfort that the Norwegian had established for himself. The strange little papers he left strewn about, the smell of sodd in the kitchen, how Loki would sometimes fall asleep in his favorite reading chair in the living room; Clint loved the small things that had somehow made up everyday life.

When he was watching Loki cook one day, something that the man had gotten into the more comfortable he had gotten with American appliances, he wondered how much longer he would be privy to the smell of lapskaus cooking. He wondered how long he could avoid being shipped off somewhere himself, namely back to Brooklyn where he was likely actually needed.

Loki was staring at him when he came to himself, his brows raised in expectation. Clint only shook his head, burying his head in his arms. He heard the other man chuckle, but decided not to look up. He couldn’t handle much more looking forward, it only depressed him in the end.

Seemingly done with his cooking, he heard Loki sit down across from him at the kitchen table. Only then did he bother to look up, and Loki was smirking in the way he did when something particularly amused him.

“You seem tense of late, Mr. Barton.” He had his hands cupped together, his shoulders slack and relaxed. “As you Americans say, a penny for your thoughts?”

At that, the Norwegian man reached across the table, tucking his long pianist fingers behind Clint’s ear before withdrawing them, a perfectly shining penny in his palm. Clint sighed, and only managed a crook of a smile.

He reached across the table, slowly plucking the coin from Loki’s hands. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” he mumbled. “This was my assignment for the longest time.” He glanced out the window to the slowly falling snow. “And it’s done, really. It’s finished. You’re healthy again, you’ve agreed to work with us. They don’t need me to keep coming here, really.” He twiddled the penny over his knuckles. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to keep coming.”

Loki folded his hands flat against each other, before pulling them apart to reveal a German coin in his palm. “There’s one last thing you can know, before you decide whether or not you need to keep coming.” He flicked the coin to set it spinning on the table. “About a year ago, _Kommandant_ Lang began to act strangely. He was reclusive, quiet. None of the other SS officers could convince him to dine or drink with them, or to discipline prisoners.

“On Christmas Eve, in the dead of night, he came to my room and held me at gunpoint, insisting that I take his coat. He took me out of the camp, disguised not terribly convincingly as another officer. We escaped, and he bound my feet and hands, covered my face with a gas mask, and tossed me under a tarp in the back of his jeep. I tried to sleep through the jostling, and the fear. But I just couldn’t help wondering, I couldn’t help being frightened. I had seen hundreds of men shot to death for blinking too slowly, for having the wrong color eyes, or speaking the wrong language in their prayers. I thought I had outgrown fear, had it ground out of me.”

“You can never take the fear out of a thinking man,” Clint muttered to the penny in front of him, and Loki hummed in agreement. “The thinking man will always have something to fear.”

The man across from him remained quiet for a while, watching the snow out the other window just as Clint was a few moments before. “For the first time I could remember for a long while, that night, I actively knew that I didn’t want to die.” His green eyes danced with an alchemical glint. “For the longest time death seemed like the way out, but as I nearly froze beneath that tarp on what would be our way to Switzerland, and the Allied hovel that Lang had sniffed out, I decided that I wanted to live.”

Clint straightened a bit, still holding the penny in his hands. Slowly, he reached over to where Loki’s hands still lay open, the Nazi coin in his left hand. He gingerly replaced the penny in his right hand, deciding that leaving his hands over Loki’s in that moment was simply the right idea.

Loki’s fingers twitched, but made no other move to brush him off. “I still want to live,” he continued in almost a whisper. “I’ll do whatever I can to insure that I do.”

The agent nudged at Loki’s hand, and the Norwegian looked at him and away from the window with curiosity.

“Is it really living, though, if you’re not happy?”

The cryptographer, for all his acuity, seemed not to understand him, instead tilting his head to one side. The moue of distaste on his face made it look like even the concept of happiness left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Clint wanted to sweeten that bitterness, more than most things he had ever wanted in his life before. “Life isn’t always about just surviving, or about having the upper hand,” he said, being very careful to not sound accusing. One wrong word here or there and Loki would close off, and there was no scarier behavior that Loki had than that. “It’s about finding the things that feed your soul. Things that make the gray go away for a while.”

“What do you have?” Clint started at the monotonicity of Loki’s voice. “What makes the rainy days a little bit less drowning?”

“This house.” Loki blinked at that. “I have you, and Thor. I have shows at the Wilbur on Friday nights. Archery. When I lived in DC I had teaching my neighbors’ little girl, Katie, how to play baseball. I have my friend Natasha, whose sole purpose in life is to swear at me in Russian.”

A pained little smile flickered on Loki’s lips. “Ice cream with raspberries.”

What smile struggled on Loki’s face blossomed on Clint’s. “Ice cream with raspberries.”

But that gave Loki pause, and a look of genuine concentration settled over him. “Reading,” he said, and Clint waited with eager ears for the rest. “Playing chess with Bruce. Thor raking the leaves only to turn around and play in them like a child.” He managed to make himself laugh. “Hearing you ring the doorbell in the morning.”

“Except for when I’m late.” Loki laughed at that, and his hands shifted under Clint’s. He still chose not to move. “Did you ever… have anyone in Norway? Someone you left behind?”

The Norwegian shook his head. “No. I think you and I can both agree that I was likely too strange to attract anyone. And I never was as winsome as my brother, try as I might.”

Clint scowled. “You’re shitting me right?” Loki just about jerked his hands away he was so startled. “Admittedly, when I first met you I thought they’d dug you up and reanimated you like out of that Shelley novel. But even when you started to get a little bit of pep back in your step, I knew that you were amazing. And now that you’ve got some actual meat on your bones anyone would fall to a knee in front of Hitler himself for a chance to mean something to you.”

That actually made Loki blush all the way up to his ears. His eyes were wide and he blinked rapidly, as if trying to assess all of the flattery data that he had just been bombarded with. Clint could almost imagine the sound that Loki’s brain was making between his ears; he’d heard one of his cryptography machines growl miserably when it hadn’t been able to transmit its data properly.

After a moment, the cogs finally seemed to turn somewhere in that knotted lump of gray matter, and Loki coughed idly while his mouth worked soundlessly on a word. “I suppose that’s something to add to my list,” he said finally, trying and almost succeeding to sound as imperial as he could. Clint couldn’t help but find it endearing. “Though I think you exaggerate for the sake of making a point, appreciated though it is.”

“I _never_ exaggerate,” Clint defended, and tapped Loki’s palm as he finally drew his hands up and off the Norwegian’s. “But you have to understand something.” Loki left his palms open, one coin still in each. Clint tapped each coin. “War may well indeed make monsters of us all. But it also makes the strangest of bedfellows.”

“You get to choose now, Loki.” He tapped the penny. “You’ve earned your way in: you have our trust.”

Then, he tapped the Nazi coin. “But I get the feeling you still have one foot over the Atlantic. You’re torn between sentiment and animus. Between serenity and rage. You have to decide now which one gets to control you, and what manner of future you have. You have to settle, for yourself, what’s right and what’s wrong.” Clint sighed. “I get the feeling that no one will ever be able to come to a consensus: this is the be-all end-all, and no conflict like that heals neatly.”

Loki turned his hand, holding the penny between the pads of his forefinger and thumb. The Nazi coin lay flat and unmoving on his other palm. “Was it not Bertrand Russell who said that war does not determine who is right – only who is left?”

Clint nodded, but didn’t interrupt.

Slowly, the Norwegian turned the hand still holding the Nazi coin in the same way, as if to hold both coins in comparison. The pallid silver swastika glinted in the white light drifting in from outside. Lincoln’s face glowed warmly in that same light.

In a deft flick of his wrist, Loki perched the Nazi coin on his index finger and flicked it to Clint. He caught it deftly, while Loki palmed the penny.

“You keep that one,” he said, though his voice was dark. “For an exhibit in that completed file of yours.”

 

Clint moved into the spare room in the Mockingbird House on April 1st, 1944 after having been ordered by _ICE_  to learn the mysterious ways of their new Norwegian agent. Thor remained in Boston, but visited that day with a carton of vanilla ice cream and a batch of early raspberries.

He discovered that it was Loki’s 24th birthday.

The Mockingbird File still lived on their bookshelf in the living room just behind Loki’s chair, and it had grown fat with photographs and letters. The Nazi coin lived in Clint’s pocket, the penny, a still polished 1914, lived in Loki’s.

 

The first time he ever saw Loki cry was on April 29th, 1945. It was over a letter Loki had gotten in the mail, and it had taken Clint six hours to pry it from the other man’s hands. It was a short message, decrypted in Loki’s sharp slanted handwriting and littered with tearstains.

It only had six words.

“Liberated by 42nd Division: Dachau, Bavaria.”

 

The second time Clint ever saw Loki cry was on September 2nd, 1945. He didn’t have to ask why the tears shed that day were both joyous and grieving. He shed them himself, for his friends, for his family, and for everyone who had gone under in the tide of blood that swept over Europe.

Clint could only wonder how many years it would take to wash all the blood and bones away.

 

The Mockingbird house was empty for three months in the fall of 1949. Clint stayed in a barrack at Otis, waiting for the madness and red paranoia that had settled over America to fade. He himself was under observation, to assure that he had not been brainwashed or tampered with by the Eastern Bloc Spies.

In December, both Loki and Thor were released form wherever the other G-Men had been holding them. Thor stayed with them until February, pale and withdrawn. Loki took care of him, resolute, and undeterred by Truman’s reign. Clint took care of them both, and when spring arrived and the sea air began to carry the smell of trees blossoming, Thor returned to Boston stronger than Clint had ever seen him.

 

Clint’s favorite thing, probably in all of what he knew of the world, was when Loki got so flustered he couldn’t cognate English. More specifically, he liked to _be_ what made Loki unable to cognate English, and to reap the benefits of the amusement it brought him.

Loki didn’t mind it too much either.

 

In 1960, Clint wrangled a hard-bound copy of _To Kill A Mockingbird_ to be delivered to their door with a sprig of purple heather for the celebration of their anniversary. Loki kept the heather in a vase on their kitchen table for as long as it remained reticent, and kept the book, which he finished in one day,  on his nightstand.

When finally he had to make room on the nightstand for other things, the book joined the Mockingbird file still on their bookshelf, which had erupted many years before and monopolized several photo albums.

It remained there on that shelf long after the house lay empty: a show of lasting respect for old ghosts. Pressed between the cover and the title page remained also two coins: a 1940 5 Mark silver coin, and a fading 1914 penny.

**Author's Note:**

> This project bit me so hard in the ass that I couldn't avoid writing it. It kept me up all night a while back and demanded to be done. So, I apologize for the fact that this exists, and more chapters of my other projects don't.
> 
> In any case, this is of a personal interest to me in a lot of ways, hence it's length and likely ungodly circumstances. Creative license is my only excuse, and I'll run with that until the Plot Police come and cart me away.
> 
> All Norwegian included is relatively unimportant/discernible if you have a grasp of English or another Germanic language. PS: Google translate works too.
> 
> I own nothing, admit to nothing, and regret nothing.


End file.
